


Down the Catacombs

by Amylion



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Of sorts at least, One Shot, Post-RotJ, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prequel and Clone Wars References, Sad Ending, Some Headcanon too, Sorry Not Sorry, lots of angst really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22035640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amylion/pseuds/Amylion
Summary: After the Empire has been defeated and the war been fought, they all have to find their own ways to cope. Leia-Anakin Skywalker/Vader one shot.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55
Collections: 2019 Star Wars Secret Santa





	Down the Catacombs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowsong26](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowsong26/gifts).



> This fic was written for the Secret Santa Fic Exchange hosted by Silver Daye. Shadowsong26, this is for you. I hope you like it, though it may not be entirely what you were expecting. I’m afraid there’s no holiday cheer to be found here. Although I didn’t use the actual prompt, I was inspired by “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

It was dark here. The high, vaulted ceilings, invisible to the human eye in so little light, gave the impression of an endless expanse of night stretching out above him, or with a bit of imagination, it could also be a cave. It was just possible to see where you walked, but other than that the halls seemed completely swallowed by shadows. Perhaps it was not only the lighting conditions that caused that.

There, just a little further, he could make out the small circle of light that marked her presence. “Isn’t it about time you came back to us?” he asked as he came closer, unable and unwilling to mask the sadness in his voice.

She startled, even though she must have heard the echo of his footsteps approaching.

“Haven’t you buried yourself in here with the ghosts of the past long enough now? I’m scared you’re beginning to forget you actually belong to the living.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “But to create a future you have to understand the mistakes of the past.”

“I know, I know,” he sighed. Then: “It’s just that we barely see you at all these days. We worry. And this place gives me the creeps. It’s like every nightmare anyone ever had here is still trapped between these walls.”

“Luke,” she began with vigour - it was not the first time they had this argument - but she left the appellation hanging there, leaving whatever else she’d wanted to say unsaid. “All right,” she continued after a while. “Is it dinner time yet?”

He broke into a smile. “I’d say it is, it definitely is.” Together, brother and sister walked through the darkened halls, leaving the oppressive catacombs behind, and back into the noise and bustle of the planet’s everyday affairs. The contrast couldn’t be bigger, and it seemed unreal that such a place as they’d just exited could possibly exist on a planet like Coruscant, neon advertisements covering every inch of every surface, and it was quite likely that most of the planet’s inhabitants, those who were born here and would die here without ever having left the surface, would never once in their lifetime experience real and all enveloping silence.

They weren’t catacombs in the strict sense of the word, although no one would contest that designation. These were the lower levels of the former Imperial Palace, which had been the Jedi Temple before that, and considering the horrors that had taken place here, it was entirely understandable they gave Luke the shivers. Or maybe he felt something in the Force, maybe everything that had happened here, had left a mark of sorts. Though she wouldn’t know. She stayed far away from that strange power. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to feel the same awe, the reverence for it that Luke did. She had thought long and hard on the subject, and realised she only felt a vague fear and mostly revulsion for the Force. Leaving the universe’s fate in the hands of a religious doctrine, because the force’s wielders and believers inevitably seemed to group together, reacting to impulses mere mortals couldn’t perceive, was perverse to her. Both the Jedi and the Sith were firm examples of that. Furthermore, it went against her egalitarian upbringing, and didn’t agree with the political hierarchy of democratic proceedings that was her religion, if she had to have one at all.

One could say it was contradictory then that she’d spent the past weeks in what had for many centuries been the hub of these occult powers she rejected so strongly. Every angle, every stone of the building reflected that history. And it _was_ contradictory. Though she did not see it that way at the moment. Perhaps it was those extra senses she had, but didn’t acknowledge, that had led her here in the end. Be that as it may, once Imperial Center had become Coruscant again, she and Luke had immediately jumped on the chance to visit and explore the former Imperial Palace. In Luke’s case because of his fresh-faced, naive crusade to uncover anything he could possibly find on the Jedi past of the father he still worshipped, despite everything. Or rather, worshipped again, after what had happened at the second Death Star by Endor. She wasn’t entirely sure about the specifics, didn’t care to hear the story right now, but the gist of it was that the old attack dog had finally turned against his master, and ended it all. If only he had died as well in doing so.

Her own reasons to visit the old Jedi Temple slash Imperial Palace, were a bit more convoluted. She’d proclaimed she wished to see the archives where Palpatine had hidden, instead of, contrary to what had been believed for many years, destroyed, the old Republic’s records and his own collections. Art and immeasurably valuable historical sources, scientific studies, an extensive collection of sociopolitical works and all those artefacts that, essentially, were a reflection of her father’s stories she had grown up with - _about Padmé Amidala_ , among other things, _about the Jedi, of whom_ he _was the greatest_ , a voice inside her whispered, but she mercilessly squashed it down again. Stories she’d been raised on, but never got to live, as billions of beings of her generation. They were the lost children who’d only ever known tyranny and the shattered dreams of their parents. And so that was what she was doing here: to double check those stories, to see if perhaps she could find some fragments of the life she could have lived had not everything gone to hell, to create a backstory for herself and her loved ones that was not overshadowed by war and repression. And what else she had found, was the Empire’s own classified information. And she knew she had to look her immense pain in the eye, in order to be able to ever let it go. So she read it all. About the atrocities and the genocides, the covered up military ops, the dirty politics in the backrooms, the warring for favours, power and positions, tearing open that gaping wound in her chest again, to let out the toxins that had gathered there over the years. Luke thought she shouldn’t immerse herself so deeply, that it was harmful or even dangerous to her, but she disagreed. She had to know, had to understand, to make sense of her life so far, so she could have a chance at building a future without the shadows of her trauma clouding it. Perhaps it would be cathartic.

There was no system to her research, she just followed her instincts. And oddly, the atmosphere of the catacombs - it was just easier to call them by that name - helped, because it perfectly reflected how she felt. Sometimes she just wandered around, amazed at the size of these rooms, at the enormity of these collections. There was more here than any being could ever read in a lifetime. Day and night blurred together, there was only the perpetual darkness, heavy with dust and memories, that was indifferent to her presence. Indifferent to her. She was less than a speck of dust in a story that in itself didn’t care how it unfolded. She didn’t believe in destiny, only in action and reaction, in beings with their petty desires and fallible characters making mistakes and sometimes amends. At times she left to attend meetings, to have dinner with her brother, to sleep next to her lover. But she always came back here.

On this side of Coruscant it was programmed to only rain at night, so it must be late, she registered absently as she shook the drops off her coat. They had eaten, they had not talked about Luke’s father, of whom she was aware he was currently residing less than an hour’s travel from where she was right now, they had had wine, lots of it, there had been laughter too, but also tension, because of the things they did not talk about, and in a way, they were all weary. A bone deep weariness, that came from years of disturbed sleep, of nightmares and fear and the constant internal battle they waged against their fight or flight instinct, and of finally being able to exhale, and sit back, and relax; and everything they’d locked away for years to be able to fight another day, now slowly seeped to the surface. But none of them were equipped to deal with that. The past years, most of their lives in fact, had all been about survival. But now they had to live.

She was tipsy, definitely, and glad to be alone now, glad for the silence. Soon she’d leave this place - and maybe she could leave her dark memories here as well - but for now, just a little longer, she cherished the silence. No decisions to make for now. Drowsiness quickly took her away as she rolled herself in the blanket. She sighed contentedly.

She squinted, because there was a blue light in the distance and she tried to make out its source. Very slowly, it came closer, but it was still diffused, she couldn’t make out what exactly she was looking at. Her sleep meddled brain didn’t help, the shadows that, she suddenly realised, almost always obfuscated a clear view in this space, only enhanced that effect. She sat up, focussing hard in order to see.

In the morning there was the familiar hum of her brother making caf in the kitchen. Why Luke insisted to live in this tiny apartment when he could go anywhere he wanted, was a mystery to her, but she had to admit, she never objected when he offered her a place to spend the night when her own much more spacious bedroom was further away.

Han would take her home last night, they were spending a night together long overdue. She’d left alone, walked through the rain. Next to the cot she’d installed here, now at least three weeks ago, maybe longer, two, three months, her still wet coat lay in a heap.

“Are you allright?” Her brother looked at her strangely.

“Yes,” she said automatically, smiling wanly at him, accepting the cup of caf he offered her. “Just lost in thought. We sure had a lot to drink last night.”

He answered her smile with one of his own. “Yes.” He watched her intently. “What are your plans for the day?”

She shook her head. “What are yours?”

“A few meetings. After, you could maybe come with me-”

“Don’t, Luke. We’ve been over this.”

He nodded, all understanding. “Do what you have to do,” he said mildly. “I’ll come for you tonight.”

It was very quiet here. Normally she’d hear someone’s steps approaching, the sound of hurried breathing - now there was nothing, but she wasn’t worried. It was a blue saber, she could see it now, and the person holding it was not necessarily walking towards her, but making the most of the space available to him, and he was talking, calmly explaining every move he made.

“Copy my stance, mind your feet.” He smiled at her, even as she didn’t move, stood frozen. He slowly walked around her, repeating the kata’s he’d been performing for the past hours, until she could dream them. Patiently regarded her, all suppressed energy, now channelled in a calming flow, that enveloped her, took her along on its currents -

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you tonight. You know where to find me.”

He nodded, giving her a half wave as she left, looking at her long after she’d gone.

She knew who he was, she’d even recognise him in her dreams by now. She knew who he’d become. Or had been. It was hard to keep the two apart at times. And despite herself, she felt at ease around him and wished this version of him could talk back to her.

“Slavery is not condoned, officially, but it does happen, doesn’t it?” She was outraged, yet her tone and body language were restrained in every way. Regal, was the word that came to mind. “Babies, children, people born in that deplorable state, who will die in the same chains. We _officially_ do not condone it, but that is _all_ we do.”

A boy, very young. Sun beating down on him, a woman, reaching for him, they were separated, he didn’t cry, but stood very still. She nodded and smiled at him from a distance. He smiled back, but there was no joy in it. Then they both set to work.

“This is our republic, and we should fight for the weakest, yet the only debates I hear here pertain to the economic stability of the core planets. However, and mind my words, we are as strong as we are together, and as weak as the weakest link. We are abandoning billions of beings right now. We can do better. And become what in our words we claim to be and in our hearts we hope to be.”

It was perhaps the most emotional footage of her mother available.

“No, it’s not,” he said, smiling mischievously.

She wished she had never found _those_ images, because he was in them too, and they were never meant to have been captured either, but talking about such a sensitive topic in a public place was not the wisest. “This baby is a blessing.” And: “It’s a girl, I’m sure of it,” he said.

“You’ve been real quiet, sweetheart,” Han said.

She startled, looked up from her dinner, which had gone cold.

“That place is messing with your brain.”

She forced herself to smile. “No, it’s not. I’m just tired.”

How long ago had that been? A week? She hadn’t gone home for at least a week now, but this piece of legislature she was reading right now was fascinating. To see the democratic process unfold, detailed in these files, it filled her with excitement, because they were figuring out how to do that again and she’d finally live her purpose: a politician, like her parents before her. _Like her mother before her._ And sadness, too. War movements, that the senate had voted on. There he creeped in again, in the filthy corners of history; histories of destruction, of pain. War movements. How old was he at the time? She counted - no older than twenty, younger even. To think that he’d then condemned his children to a similar life. But no - she shouldn’t go there. It was fruitless to think of those things. A life of slavery. Then war movements. So little cause for joy. And the Jedi - she’d have to talk to Luke about that, but the Jedi didn’t strike her as a group she liked. Manipulative, justifying their meddling with talk of foresight, that ordinary beings did not have. They wore the robes of mysticism, but really, they were warlords. Forced by circumstances, perhaps, yes. And in action they sure were a formidable sight. It stole her breath away. Very briefly, she felt a spark of the hero worship billions of beings all over the galaxy must have felt. He’d become an icon. But really, he was a very flawed, tormented being. How to unite these two radically different personas in one’s sense of self? Did that ultimately tear him apart? A good person, set on a path of evil deeds. Or an evil person, who’d tried to do good for a while, but ultimately failed. It didn’t work like that. She did not believe in good and evil as unshakable categories. Although it had served her well, that simple distinction; to fight a war and keep fighting it, one had to believe. She couldn’t hold on to that simple dichotomy anymore though, she was aware, if she intended to become a successful stateswoman. But that also meant re-evaluating _him_ , according to new, more complex standards.

“Come see him.” Luke asked her at least once a week, and he knew how much that question pained her, but Luke’s coping mechanism was his unshakable belief in how everything was mendable. That things could be fixed. Anakin had also believed that, though with the added maxim that it was he who could and had to fix all things. Luke was more humble - less of a masochist. How did she know that?

There was so much to find about him, some things of a very personal nature, Palpatine’s observations, dating back to Anakin’s childhood. That had shocked her, because what it seemed to imply was that he hadn’t so much tragically, incidentally stumbled on then fallen on the path of evil, but that he’d deliberately been orchestrated in that direction, and even if one tried to resist it, what did that say about free will? How much power had he ever really had over his own life? It meant he was never supposed to have children, a family, that someone had worked hard to prevent that - to deny all four of them the happiness of an ordinary family. He’d been moulded into the shape Palpatine had thought would best suit his purposes. She hadn’t been looking for information on him on purpose, but it had been impossible to avoid. He was everywhere.

And she hated it.

“I’m not coming,” she said gently. “His redemption is a truth you cling to, and I won’t deny you that, but I have different truths.”

“But can you really accept me as your brother while denying where we come from?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes, I can. We are not determined by our bloodline, Luke. But I love having you as my brother. You were my brother long before we learned about our heritage.”

He sighed, looking forlorn. She knew what he thought, he’d said it a hundred times already, but he didn’t do so now - about destiny, the Force and the future, about an old prophecy. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind someday. It could give you closure, I think.”

“Don’t you mean, it could give me closure, _and_ him?”

“He never once asked.”

“But we both know the two of you don’t need words to communicate.”

Luke shrugged in that adorable, deflective way of him.

“Can we not have this conversation again, please? I’m not ready for this. Let me deal with this in my own time, okay?”

It was a miracle he’d survived. There’d been very little left of him, no ordinary human would have survived that inferno. It’d made her sick to the stomach, and not just by the descriptions, but also because this particular part of history had forced her to recognise what lay behind the mask, had forced her - before she was ready, she might not ever have been ready - to see the man and the suit as one. She remembered. The feeling of that steel hand clasping her shoulder too hard, leaving bruises that had been there for weeks. And the moment she’d been closer to him than anyone must have been in years, her back pressed against his chest, the worst moment of her life, when her home, when her _history_ , was obliterated before her eyes. It had been cold, didn’t feel like a human being at all, hard and inflexible, and why did she remember those very specific details? It had been so easy to dehumanise him. And how before that he’d borne down on her, asking the same question again and again, that rumbling bass still louder than her screams, and the patience with which he’d done that had been the cruellest thing of all. But no - she should not go there.

She hadn’t been reading for hours, just walked aimlessly through the dark, remembering, lost in her own dark thoughts, that seemed to hurt all the more now she knew there was a context and history to her suffering. And that was when she found the original blueprints for the construction of Darth Vader. With a perverse kind of fascination, she looked at them. And bit straight through her lip, because this was sick, sick, sick.

***

When she’d first realised what she was going to do next her heart had pounded so loud and fast she was scared she’d get a heart attack. She sat down, clutched her chest, and forcibly calmed down her breathing. This idea was the worst, the absolute worst. But she knew she’d go through with it. There was no way back now, not after all she’d learned, not if she ever wanted to bring this thing to an end.

She knew Luke was away, she’d be alone. It was a nondescript door, one you’d find in any medcenter or public building, although she’d had to walk for a long time through increasingly more sparingly populated corridors to get here and had had her code cilinders read more times than she could count. She could still go back, she thought, with her hand on the door handle. It was not too late. She didn’t have to do this, no once forced her to do this. But she was raised an Organa, and once she knew something was the right course to follow, she never aborted her mission. She was brave. And so she opened the door, and found herself in a darkened room, smelling strongly of antiseptic, and larger than she’d expected. It had to be too, for all the machinery it housed. It was hot in here. In the middle of it all, there he was. But she would not have recognised him.

This was not the young slave, Jedi or general. None of the constantly alternating raging softness and harshness of his youth to be found here, none of the trauma, intense anger and heartache, sadness and longing. Nor was it the Sith he had become. This was what had come _after_ all of that, what remained. At first she couldn’t make out his form in the minimal light, but even discounting that fact, it was no surprise. There was very little left of him. From a distance she could barely see his face, partially obscured behind a breathing mask, that looked more complicated than a standard oxygen mask. For a long time she simply stood there, slowly acclimatising to simply being in the same room as him. Then she approached him, slowly, utterly calm, her footsteps muffled in the soundproofed room. He might have been asleep before, but he’d opened his eyes at her entrance, and looked at her as she stood over him. Blue eyes. Neither of them spoke, simply looking at the other, but expectation hung heavy in the air. Something was about to happen, something monumental. He’d been stripped of the suit completely, including the limbs, and its functions were now taken over by external mechanical support, machines of which she didn’t recognise the exact purpose, but their tubes and wires snaked all over and into his body. The little she could see of his chest reflected what she’d learnt earlier, implanted ports and pieces of metal interrupting the skin. His face didn’t look nearly as terrifying as she’d expected, the old scars and skin grafts faded, giving him, wholly unexpected, a rather mild appearance. And though he seemed to have trouble focussing, the eyes were all Luke.

“Anakin,” she said.

His eyes widened marginally, grateful but surprised at her recognition of his name.

“Leia,” he said back, the voice was weak, thin, he had trouble speaking, but that was not the reason why he inflected her name slightly differently than to how she was used to hearing it. It struck her that for the first time in her life she’d heard her name pronounced as it was supposed to sound. This was the man who had given it to her, after all; who knew the stories behind it, the desert and suns and scorching sand, whose wife had loved it and named her in her final moments.

Leia nodded jerkily just once, shaken more deeply than she’d thought possible. That was all they said in the following minutes, minutes that became half an hour, perhaps longer, perhaps less so. His eyes closed again, he slept, but it was not an easy sleep, fitful, he woke intermittently to look at her, and she felt emptier than ever before, and every thought she’d ever thought felt meaningless and elusive right now. It was clear he was in pain, his body pulling him in a direction the machines wouldn’t let him follow.

“It would have been kinder to just let you die, wouldn’t it?” she said in the stillness.

She had his undivided attention again, his unblinking stare locked on hers. “Yes,” he said eventually in that strange half-whisper of his.

“Luke could never let you go,” she said, her hand reached down to touch his shoulder briefly. It was warm.

It was a sad little smile he gave her.

“But I can.” She was very calm. “Say my name again.”

“Leia…”

“Again,” she whispered, and bent down to hear it better, their faces nearly touching.

“Leia. Your name is Leia.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “It is. And now you can rest.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if I made you sad.


End file.
